Resources

Registering a Domain Name

From an internet marketing and SEO perspective your chosen domain name should ideally contain a 'hint' about what your online store is selling rather than your trading/business name.

A domain name that contains a product sales message, or what your business does will help your placement in the search engines. For example, if you are setting up as an online plumbers merchant then try to incorporate 'plumber' 'plumbers' or 'plumbers merchant' into the domain name, rather than XYZ supplies for example because it will help with Google search results when someone types 'plumbers' into the search box.

A plumbers merchant might register the domain name somecityonlineplumbersmerchant.com for example, and having a name like this would help to return reasonable search results in Google for the phrases 'plumber', 'plumbers', 'plumbers merchant' etc etc. And since Google introduced GEO targeting of search results, a city or town in the domain name would help in search results, because Google will filter and elevate results appropriate to the searchers geographic location.

You might have heard the expression SEO or Search Engine Optimization being bandied around, well what I have described above can help in the SEO process.

Having 'keywords' in the domain name that say something about what you sell, or what your business does is used by Google when gathering search results from it's database, and contributes around 5% of how much "weight" your website carries in those results. That 5% could mean a link to your website appearing on page 1 rather than page 2 in Google results.

My advice is.. the chances are that the greater proportion of your online traffic is likely to come from search engines, so it's better to have a long descriptive domain name containing a few keywords about what you sell, rather than your business name which unless you are a major brand name probably won't carry any 'weight' in search results.

That doesn't mean you can't use your business domain name, domain names are relatively cheap so having 2 or more won't break the bank, and it's simple enough to set up parking in your website hosting package up to 'alias' your business domain name into your online shop. Doing it that way you get the best of both worlds, a meaningful and SEO friendly domain for search engines, and your regular business domain name both working simultaneously for you.